A case to look through
A market
How can people with different purposes make their plans fit together?
Markets are useful for thinking about alignment because they can produce extensive coordination while asking remarkably little agreement from the participants.
Start with the puzzle
The participants are not a team.
A buyer and seller need not share a goal. Firms compete. Workers, owners, consumers, and suppliers can have substantially different purposes.
Yet their activities can become mutually compatible on enormous scales. The interesting question is therefore not simply whether they agree. It is how heterogeneous plans become coordinated.
Try looking at this case through
Concordance
Opposed preferences can coexist with compatible trajectories.
MechanismCoupling
Prices and exchange make one participant's choices part of the conditions faced by others.
MechanismShared signals
Prices make every participant work with the same set of signals.
DissociationAgreement ≠ concordance
Successful coordination does not establish common values or goals.
Another lensTransformational alignment
The larger coordination pattern can change as technologies, prices, occupations, and opportunities change.
Look again